News Story

Hitman: Absolution dumped regenerating health

In the latest issue of Official PlayStation Magazine, IO Interactive’s director Tore Blystad revealed that the early build of Hitman: Absolution was to have regenerating health, but a design decision was made to drop it.

“You have to think more if you want to play this as a true Hitman game," Blystad explained, "If you can constantly assault and then hang back and regenerate the challenge gets lost. We actually opted for a hybrid system here. You regenerate something then we have health stations around the game if you want to use them.”

“With all the mechanics within the game we tried to apply them in a way that fits the game that we are making. We have some checkpoints to make it slightly easier to get an overview over a section of the game. So you don’t have to worry about the entire massive levels – they’re very, very huge,” he explained.

Blystad added, “In the old games you had this kind of a butterfly effect where you could be doing something in this corner of the level and it could spread out and it just messed up everything that you did. You could spend three hours getting to a point and in three seconds you’d destroyed everything you did. We wanted to make sure the player had more freedom to push the game, and the game would push back, but it wouldn’t demolish you immediately.”

Hitman: Absolution is due to be released on the 20th November 2012 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Check out Strategy Informer's preview here.